The concrete was still wet when the new Garage Museum of Contemporary Art opened this week in Moscow’s Gorky Park, but that didn’t stop the crowds. Designed by Rem Koolhaas’s OMA for the expanding art space helmed by collector and magazine editor Dasha Zhukova, the Garage preserves Moscow’s architectural past, sets a new bar for the future of contemporary art, and revitalizes a park along the way. Here’s a quick tour.

1. The Garage is named after its first location, the Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage. The industrial building was designed by Konstantin Melnikov in 1926. First called the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, the space has grown into the city’s largest private contemporary art museum.

2. Gorky Park hasn’t always been this nice. The expansive riverside park became a bit shabby during the later Soviet period, but thanks to advances like a public smoking ban, you can expect to see more people on yoga mats and in paddleboats.

3. Building the Garage what something of a homecoming for Rem Koolhaas. Before he was a starchitect, Koolhaas was a journalist. A trip to Moscow in 1965 introduced him to Soviet Modernism, and spurred a career change. “This building connects me to my original incentive to become an architect,” Koolhaas said.

4. The museum is a great example of OMA’s interest in preservation. Built in 1968, the building originally housed a restaurant designed to seat 1,000 people. OMA and the Garage revived the building, keeping the original stairs, brick and glazed green-tile walls, as well as a stunningly anachronistic Soviet mosaic of a woman floating skyward.

5. Every garage needs a door. The iconic view of the 58,000-square-foot building is from the southeastern side, with one-tenth of the 100-meter translucent polycarbonate façade that can be raised, exposing the inner workings of the building.

6. Ping-pong balls rained down during the press conference. They were from a piece by Rirkrit Tiravanija. Associated with relational aesthetics—art that invites the audience to participate—the Thai artist installed 15 ping-pong tables on the second floor for museumgoers to use. The Garage will host a championship for Ping Pong Club Moscow this summer.

7. The building will exhibit a cube of nuclear waste…in 3015. American artist Taryn Simon worked with Rosatom, a state-owned nuclear company, to vitrify a cube of radioactive material. When it is safe to do so, it’ll be displayed at the Garage. The whole process, which started last week, takes between 850 and 1,000 years.

divpYayoi Kusama's Infinity Room at the Garage Museum

Courtesy of the Garage Museum

8. Kusama-rama. It's all but guaranteed that many of the photos tagged #GarageMCA will be selfies taken in Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirrored Room—The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away,” a mirrored enclosure filled with blinking lights that surrounds viewers in their own private universe. The Japanese multimedia artist also painted another gallery red and white, filled it with polka-dotted sculptures, and even wrapped some trees behind the museum in similar cloth.

9. The Garage is keeping track. Beyond its public art library and ever-growing archive, the Garage also supports research-based initiatives through its Field Research projects, where artists respond to obscure elements of Russian culture. One current example is Anton Vidokle’s show looking at cosmism, a 19th-century Russian philosophy that blends Eastern and Western traditions, as well as scientific research.

10. Walk through Gorky Park to see the Garage’s Shigeru Ban pavilion. With cardboard columns, the architecture is purposefully transient, designed to last about three years. Up now is a monumental work by German painter Katharina Grosse.

11. A major Louise Bourgeois show opens in September. The Garage will display a series of relatively unexamined pieces the iconic sculptor made during the last two decades of her life. Plan your next trip accordingly.